The present invention relates to a recording/reproducing apparatus suitable for a disk drive or the like for recording/reproducing data to/from recording media in a computer system, a multi-media system, a data communication system and the like.
It is a general practice to provide various softwares and data to be used in a computer system by using recording media such as an optical disk, an optical magnetic disk, a magnetic disk, a memory card, a magnetic tape and the like or for users to store data and the like in those recording media.
In this case, a disk drive for performing a recording/reproducing operation on the recording media such as the optical disk and the optical magnetic disk is normally connected to a host computer to write/read data to/from the disk in correspondence to a control made from the host computer.
By the way, in the system for recording/reproducing data to/from the recording media as described above, the host computer manages a data file and the like on the recording media in general. Therefore, the host computer holds management data and management software (hereinafter referred to as file manager) for managing the file, i.e. for managing the reading/writing operation of data, in the charged disk, and requests the disk drive to write/read at the appropriate address by using the file manager.
That is, when the disk drive is seen as a single apparatus, it holds no information as the file manager to the disk and therefore, it executes the necessary operation for the first time when the write/read request is made by the host computer. In other words, the disk drive could not be used as a recording/reproducing apparatus unless it is connected to the specific host computer.
Because disk drive itself does not manage file names and the like, it cannot respond to a request for reading a file in the mode of specifying the file name from another equipment for example even if such request is made. It is the same also when a write request is made while transmitting data and a file name.
That is, the disk drive cannot be built-in a network file system independently from the host computer or cannot be used in accessing data or in storing data from another information equipment such as a note-type personal computer and PDA (Personal Digital Assistants). Therefore, the function of the disk drive has been limited and it has been required to realize a more useful usage.
In view of such problems, the present invention is intended to allow the disk drive, i.e. the recording/reproducing apparatus, to deal with a recording/reproducing request made from equipments other than the specific host computer and thereby to make the recording/reproducing apparatus and the whole data system more efficient.